Tablo TV One Month On

Back in June I took a flyer on brand shiny new gadget TabloTV. TabloTV had been on the market all of two months so there was little more than press releases at the time. To fill a void, I wrote about how one went about setting up and using TabloTV.

Where is Tablo Now?

Tablo is still ensconced in my media cabinet next to his friend AppleTV. Earlier this week (July 7), a firmware update shipped. My normal process with firmware updates is to start them right before turning in. This time, I decided to apply the update between programs. It went smoothly. This update added some nice things.

Parsimonious record new episodes logic

Record by time and channel

Support for program guide subscription

Tablo is a work in progress. The firmware that shipped in April provided a usable but partially complete DVR functionality that could not record by time and station and would greedily record new episodes (the guide would mark all airings of this week’s new Nova as new). The new front end and back end changes fixed this issue. Now, only the prime time airing is marked new. Tablo no longer records the late night showing and the next day showings on 15-2. Now I can pick series record all new episodes knowing Tablo is not going to eat the disk.

Tablo Disk Management

Tablo logic for disk space management is still in development but should be coming later this year. Until that time, delete programs after the household is finished with them. No TiVO like logic to garbage collect the file system of old watched episodes as disk space is needed.

Tablo Program Guide Subscriptions Coming

The folks at Tablo are not charging for the program guide currently because they are still working on functional issues and back end subscription management support. The latest firmware does check subscriptions. Until the store and front end features are ready, all owners are treated as subscribers. Eventually, free things will come to an end but not without adequate warning to subscribe to the guide.